Before we get to thinking about words, I’d like to introduce a picture. The Wilton diptych is one of the first pieces of art I ever looked at closely even though my first sight of it, when I was a child and I caught a glimpse of it in one of my mother’s books, took little notice of the figure kneeling in the foreground. I loved the blue-robed angels, the way that some had their arms folded (which made them seem as if they were fed up waiting for something), all the wings like sails and how that seemed to let me glide away somewhere beautiful, majestic, maybe to find creatures like the white hart painted on the reverse.

Recently I watched the BBC’s Hollow Crown adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard II and afterwards found myself looking at reproductions of the diptych for the first time in years. My attention fell on the kneeling, gold-robed figure in the foreground: Richard II, one of the first English monarchs to have himself represented in art produced during his lifetime.

It’s strange to see how Rupert Goold, the director of the Hollow Crown production of Richard II, develops this relationship with painting as a way of remaining faithful to something in language. Goold lets us know Richard not by trying to let us into his thoughts as words, as information, but by sharing with us appearances: gestures, movements, possessions and positions. Richard’s thoughts drive what we see in mysterious ways, ones closer to dreams than the narratives which usually propel films.

Virginia Woolf wrote how ‘words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.’ They are ‘the the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.’

The Wilton Diptych is a dream, a thought. Richard’s thought. If we look at it, we know him a little but possibly far more than through any historical account.